12 Tips for Optimizing SEO on Your Magento E-Commerce Site

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This series by Mohannad Ghashim of ShopGo.me is part
of our Demystifying E-Commerce series. It will explore various
technical issues involved in starting up and running an e-commerce
site.

It’s well known that, as far as e-commerce platforms go, Magento
is one of the most search-engine friendly systems. To make an
e-store more visible to potential buyers, there are many techniques
within Magento that a website admin can implement to enhance his or
her e-store ranking in search engine results. These techniques are
usually referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques.
Here is a set of tips for optimizing SEO in Magento, to make sure
customers find your store and find the right pages in your store
when they are searching for items.

In the “URL Options” menu, set the “Add Store Code to URLS”
option to “No” so that store codes are not added to URLs.

In the “Search Engine Optimization” menu, set the “Server URL
Rewrites” option to “Yes” to remove “index.php” from your URLs and
generate more search engine friendly and readable URLs.

3. Go to this path:

System => Configuration => Design => HTML Heads

Change the “Default Robots” setting to “INDEX, FOLLOW” so that
search engines can index your website and show it in search
results.

In the “Default Title” and “Default Description” boxes, write
the default title and description that you want your pages to have
just in case you forget to write a title and description when
creating a page. This will ensure that no page has blank
information, which would make it more difficult to index.

4. Make sure your e-store is directly available to search
engines by creating a “robots.txt” file containing commands that
direct search engines to the URLs you want to appear in search
engine results and also indicates which you don’t want to appear.
Here’s a link to a
good article that explains how to create this file and how to write
commands in it.

5. Make sure you write good descriptions for your new
categories, products, and pages that include several words, so that
search engines can accurately reveal those pages when potential
customers shop for related ideas or items.

6. To avoid duplications in URLs, go to this path:

System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine
Optimization

and set “Use Categories Path for Product URLs” to “No”, as shown
below:

7. To prevent Magento from generating duplicate content when you
want to show the same product in multiple categories, set both
“Canonical Link Meta Tag” fields to “Yes” on that same page, as
shown below:

8. You can also use category and product images to attract
visits from search engines to your e-store by doing the
following:

When adding an image of a product, write a meaningful
description to be used as the “title” and “alt tag” for the given
image, i.e. “Sony Vaio Laptop,” as shown below:

9. When adding a category, a product, or page, create a “URL
Key” so that your e-store URLs become more search engine friendly,
as shown below:

10. To help Google index your site, generate a Google Sitemap
automatically by going to this path:

System => Configuration => Google Sitemap

In the “Generation Settings” box, enable sitemap generation and
change its frequency according to your e-store update frequency.
This will allow Google to get your site’s most up-to-date sitemap
that includes all new items.

You can also modify sitemap settings upon adding a new
category, product, or page, so that your sitemap includes all of
your new items, as shown below:

11. You can also easily add a “Google Webmaster Tools
verification tag” in Magento by going to this path:

Set “Enable option” to “Yes” and type your Account Number in the
box as shown below:

By following these 12 tips, you are sure to optimize your site for
maximum visibility to customers, getting them directly to the
products they're looking for more quickly. Ultimately, better SEO
should mean more customers and more conversions, so it's likely
worth just changing these few elements to boost your e-commerce
business.